The Collectibles 4

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Here we have to take a short break from the ass-kickery to address the reindeer in the room. There was that big-ass orange moon in the sky on Saturday. The Massachusetts Exemplar base is getting full, from rescues being treated and debriefed over their experiences. That means a lot of medical and therapy staff, backed up by more field teams. And one of them is a face I didn’t expect to see in the field: Darklight.

The heroine walked in while I was making last-minute adjustments to the Reindeer costume and gear, back from the dead and still quite hateful of myself. I looked up at her and tried not to let out a sigh she could hear.

Darklight put her hands on her hips, her casual clothes much different from the black costume she’d been wearing when serving under an evil AI. Perhaps the difference was that the horrible burns she’d suffered from when I left her to fall out of orbit were all healed up. I checked and there were no nanomachines left in her system that could respond, just as I’d planned. “What kind of organization would stoop to using you?”

“Mine.” Medusa walked in and tossed a bag to Darklight, who caught it one-handed. “I can’t make you like Gecko, but keep the sniping to a minimum.”

I nodded to Medusa. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Medusa smiled. “I’m here to personally oversee what’s going on and to handle the Benfrike-Fawk meeting.”

“Uh, I thought I was handling that,” I said.

Medusa shrugged. “He got back with us after your call and wants to meet up tonight.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes, looking up. “Ugh!”

Darklight smiled. “I want to hear this.”

I gestured to Darklight. “Is she muscle to help y’all instead?” I asked.

“Yep. They brought me on because you can’t get the job done,” Darklight was beaming, and not in the way where she hurls light that somehow has physical mass at people.

Medusa looked to Darklight, but winked at me. “You’re off official duty for the night. We’ll have Darklight and Reindeer on duty if needed.”

I nodded. I’m so glad Medusa respects me enough to not reveal the open secret of my weredeer alter ego to someone who hates me. She’ll probably find out before long, but I feel slightly better that she’ll find out when I’m not around. I started beeping though. “That’s my alarm. I need to go.” I brought the costume along with me, but left the box with the hammer in it, the Bell Ringer I think Reindeer settled on.

My first choice of room was a storage closet that ended up having a couple in it enjoying some personal time. In my annoyance, I very nearly stayed completely ruined both of their libidos, but instead I ran out and headed to the nearest restroom. I got set up in a stall, hung the costume on a hangar on the inside of the door, and locked up. Then, I zipped my mind right off to the Bell Ringer.

I rose out of the box, a mighty hammer of vengeance and piss-offery. The room I’d been in wasn’t empty, as there were still some people hanging out in the armory cleaning and readying stuff, but Medusa and Darklight had gone. Oh well. I flew the hammer toward the door. Rather than burst through the thing, I activated a small arm in the handle that pulled it open and shut behind me, announcing, “I am a hammer, not a boorish rude jerkass!”

I went around a corner and there was Medusa right outside the restroom. “Coming through, pretty lady!” I popped through the door, starting to announce, “Whosoever holds this hammer, if they be worthy, shall wield the power of- shit!”

Darklight stood in the restroom, the broken stall door in her hands, watching the tail end of a grotesque transformation that saw bones warp, muscles bulge, and antlers stretch out from my head. She got an eyeful of all of it and declared. “Oh shit, you’re a werewolf deer thing. A lycanthrope. Why aren’t you a guycanthrope?”

Medusa chose that moment to storm in. “She’s a weredeer, and the magic behind that knows something you don’t.”

“I’m also not the Gecko you know,” Reindeer said upon standing. She grabbed her costume where it had fallen on the floor in front of her.

“I hear that a lot. Now you just have fur and horns,” Darklight responded.

“She’s not just whistling Dixie,” I told her, flying over to get between Darklight and Reindeer. “I’m the actual Gecko.”

Darklight grabbed me. I tried pulling out using the antigravs, but she was strong. “You downloaded your brain into a hammer? So all I need to do is break you…”

“I’ve connected my consciousness to a computer system in this hammer I designed to assist Reindeer. Destroying this won’t hurt me.”

Reindeer grabbed me too and tugged me away from Darklight. “It’s a unique and nonsensical situation involving ancient magic and cutting edge technology. And I’d rather not work with you if it’s all the same.”

They give me a lot of leeway, but Reindeer was still part of the Fawk thing. We got ready and deployed, all with her being judgy. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. We kept our distance from each other. That was possible by the plan for this meeting allowing for reinforcements to be nearby but not in the room or even in the building. We had to be inconspicuous so as to not frighten our prey. The assumption made by the Exemplars and agreed with by me is that a transporter makes for an awesome escape plan.

Once the voice thing was handled, that all went off without a hitch. Just a simple deal for enslaved superhumans. Bankrupting the late Migton Benfrike, we managed to buy back a good half-dozen supers. Fawk even threw in a free suit of power armor from Dr. Doldrum, who had a gun that made people lethargic and sad. He always struck on Mondays for maximum effect, but he died a couple years back. It was ruled self-inflicted, but the video evidence showed him skydiving naked while holding Roman candles and accidentally hitting a goose. They built a statue to that cool son of a bitch.

When I brought that up to Reindeer, she had the same idea as me. “Shouldn’t that still be with his family? Check to see if they struck.”

I ran a bit of a search. There were no reported sightings of Dr. Doldrum since the funeral, which required a pair of skateboard ramps built on either side of the grave site for skateboarders to jump the casket through a ring of fire. It’s what he would have wanted, along with the free bar. Glorious goddamn bastard.

Ten minutes later, I had a report for Reindeer. “This is potentially pretty bad. She disappeared two weeks back, with her boyfriend filing a police report. I don’t know it’s connected, but I’m paranoid and think it’s connected. I’m running through the inventory we have access to for anything that could be her.”

“I have movement,” came a report from an Exemplar.

Someone whispered. “They know someone’s been targeting clients. Activate the shield.”

“Activating. Hope this works,” someone said.

I projected a hologram so that Reindeer could see the forcefield panel in the sky above us. She didn’t need a hologram to see when a pair of giant robots rose out of the water. There were large, rounded bodies on pairs of legs, with arms that consisted of rocket pods and chainguns. One had that racing checkers design running up the sides of the torso; the other was painted blue with shark teeth on the front of it.

“Reindeer, Darklight!” Medusa called.

“On it.” Darklight announced herself with a burst of the titular dark light she now wields smacking into one of the big robots. They both concentrated their firepower on Darklight. The bullets did nothing, but rockets knocked her out of the sky. Reindeer caught her in one hand, carrying me in the other. I created a forcefield to block another pair of rockets. Reindeer and Darklight used the cover to fly low and head to between the pair of robots.

Reindeer reached a hand out for Darklight, who took it. My alter ego spun Darklight around to get more momentum before throwing the heroine at the other. That gave the other one an opening to fire at Reindeer and I. I put up another forcefield while telling her, “I can create an opening for you.”

Reindeer’s antlers lit up a brilliant white. Beams of light came together from the tips of her tallest antlers to join into one beam that cut through the air. I gave it an opening to jab right into the center of our robot’s rocket pod and cook off the ammo. Reindeer then took me and started spinning me around in the hammer, over and over again.

“Catch!” Reindeer declared, throwing me. I was glad I didn’t have a stomach. Instead, I had antigravity devices to negate the pull of gravity and to propel me even more rapidly toward the robot. I smashed through the chassis and embedded deep inside it. I stopped in all the internals of the machine and unleashed the lasers and flamethrowers. The smoking robot crashed into the waves from whence it came, with me flying off back toward Reindeer. She was now assisting Darklight with the other robot, the two of them punching the dented machine between the two of them. Finally, Darklight went for where its leg attached to the body and wrenched it off. The robot toppled into the water, but hadn’t sunk yet when Darklight smashed in the chassis even further with the purloined leg. It threw up a shitload of water when it went.

“Darklight here. The big guns are down.” I heard.

“We have Fawk,” Medusa reported.

And I got a ding as the analysis finished. “And I think I have a match. Unidentified female power armor user. No video of usage, missing the date Dr. Doldrum’s daughter disappeared.”

“What’s that?” Medusa asked.

Reindeer spoke up. “They had Dr. Doldrum’s armor but his daughter isn’t a supervillain. They figured out who she was and kidnapped her anyway so they could sell it and her.

I added, “We have a lot of responders on the way. I don’t know if we’re going public with this yet…”

“Let’s clear out. I’ll arrange something for them. We have more than enough to go public. It’s time to move on to the next phase,” Medusa ordered. Privately, she connected to the private channel between Reindeer and me. “Now we have to figure out what Dick Avast is doing all this for. After that, I think we should send him on a one-way trip to Mars with no transporter.”

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